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One Third of New PCs Downgraded To XP?
CWmike writes "More than one in every three new PCs is downgraded from Windows Vista to Windows XP, either at the factory or by the buyer, said performance and metrics researcher Devil Mountain Software, which operates a community-based testing network. 'The 35% is only an estimate, but it shows a trend within our own user base,' Craig Barth, the company's CTO, said. 'People are taking advantage of Vista's downgrade rights.' Last year, Devil Mountain benchmarked Vista and XP performance using other performance-testing tools and concluded that XP was much faster. Barth said things haven't changed since then. 'Everything I've seen clearly shows me that Vista is an OS that should never have left the barn.'"
Not even a first. Anybody remember Windows ME? Redmond is forgetting their history apparently....
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
A larger OS will of course use more resources. This does not surprise me in the least anyway since I am sure close to 1/3 of the people who buy new PC's get 1GB of ram or even less nowadays....and with less then 1gb and even 2gb of ram vista will bog down the system when running anything but word processing/email.
I think MS screwed up by launching vista so soon before the hardware was really ready for it. Many people may say it does nothing to improve computing, but I just think its a little before its time... (probably a first for MS anyway.)
It boggles the mind why anyone would want a low to mid range laptop to come with Vista preinstalled. And yet that's the only way to get them (reasonably).
And apparently Toshiba's only honouring the warranty now if none of the original bundled software has been removed. So a friend of mine ended up buying a cheap Toshiba, with the understanding that it functionally has no warranty, since he's immediately nuking Vista off of it.
I downgraded my Vista machine to XP. A critical pice of software I use was dog slow on vista. Dead-dog slow. By accident, i found out how to speed it up considerably - I unplugged the network cable.
No, this was not a network app. It's a CAD program. It does absolutely nothing over the network. Whassup with that? Unfortunately, I need the network, and after much fiddling and tweaking the network settings (I am qualified...) There was no change.
But, every time I disabled the network, my CAD program sped up. Until I wiped out the HD and installed XP. Now it's always fast as ever on my vista-class hardware.
VIsta gave me absolutely no benefit over XP. What's the reason for this OS?
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Add me to that chorus.
I have two laptops through work (contractor, on-site managed services).
My parent company laptop - which I don't actually need for my day to day (as I use the customers laptop) - is Vista Business Premium - Core2Duo 2Ghz, 2 Gig RAM.
Tried it, didn't like it. Apart from security, I fail to see any real advantages, and they also decided to shuffle all the menus and options around just for fun. All I notice is that stuff is slower esp file copying (yes SP1 is patched).
Aero? pffft have you ever tried compiz-fusion or any of the derivatives on any modern linux distro?
Desktop search? addons for XP and linux available.
DX10? 5% extra eye candy for 10% less performance = bad deal in my book. Of course this situation will change. Also irrelevant for busineses